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WHO: Ebola fight 'shifts to ending epidemic'

The World Health Organization say for the first time in 7 months, the number of new Ebola cases in
West Africa has fallen below 100, and the focus of efforts against the disease is shifting from slowing
transmission to ending the epidemic.

Efforts in the Ebola fight are now shifting toward ending the epidemic, and include lab and contact tracing.

To reach this goal as quickly as possible, resources have shifted from rapidly building infrastructure
to finding and managing new cases, ensuring safe burials and engaging communities, says the latest World
Health Organization (WHO) situation report on Ebola.

Different agencies are taking the lead in each new area of focus.

WHO are leading case management, case finding, lab and contact tracing, the International Federation of
Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies are leading action on safe and dignified burials, and UNICEF are
leading action on community engagement and social mobilization.

"For the first time since the week ending June 29th, 2014, there have been fewer than 100 new
confirmed cases reported in a week in the three most affected countries," declares the WHO report.

There was a total of 99 confirmed cases in the week ending January 25th, 2015: 30 in Guinea, four in Liberia, and
65 in Sierra Leone.

Altogether, these three countries have reported 22,057 confirmed, probable and suspected cases of Ebola
virus disease and 8,795 deaths. Among these numbers are 816 confirmed health worker infections, including 488 reported deaths.

Six other countries - Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Spain, the UK and the US - have also reported a case or
cases that spread from one of the three most affected countries.

The last of these was in the UK, where a health worker who returned from volunteering in Sierra Leone
was discharged from hospital on January 24th, 2015 after testing negative twice for Ebola virus disease.

Preparedness to rapidly detect and respond to Ebola exposure

WHO emphasize that unaffected countries are still at risk of importing a case of Ebola for as long as
cases are reported in any country.

For this reason, preparedness effort aims to ensure all countries are ready to detect, investigate and
report potential Ebola cases and mount effective responses. This support is provided through visits from
WHO preparedness support teams, provision of direct technical assistance and guidance and tools.

To this end, the United Nations (UN) agency has prepared a set of tools to support countries improve and accelerate their
readiness to detect and respond to Ebola. One example is the WHO Ebola preparedness checklist.

The WHO checklist identifies 11 key elements and tasks for a country to prepare its health
system to detect and respond to Ebola.

The countries to receive the focus of preparedness support are three highest priority countries: Côte
d'Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Mali and Senegal; followed by high priority countries: Burkina Faso, Benin,
Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania,
Nigeria, South Sudan, Niger and Togo.

UN praise Africa's response and urge continued push to end the epidemic

At a recent UN African Union Stakeholder Meeting on Ebola, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, UN
special representative and head of the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER),
thanked government and civil partners for their support thus far in the fight against Ebola and urged
global efforts to continue. He explained that:

"The situation is still perilous. There is still Ebola in more than 25 of the 66 districts,
counties and prefectures in the region. I ask you all to maintain support until the task is
completed."

The current Ebola outbreak in West Africa is unprecedented in world history, and so too is the response.
Over 70 countries, hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of people have been directly involved in
the fight to stop Ebola.

Ould Cheikh Ahmed highlighted the strong part played by the African Union, which offered to mobilize
1,000 health workers from all over Africa to support the affected countries. He says the response shows
Africa has "valuable assets" to support outbreaks, and:

"The epidemic has turned, and we are now beginning to see an overall decline in the number
of new cases."

However, he adds that "stopping this outbreak still requires significant additional efforts."

The UN recently launched a new appeal for $1 billion to help fund the Ebola response up to June 2015, which
needs resources to support cross-border strategies and integrated response and recovery efforts.

The meeting also discussed proposals to recover the shattered economies and societies of the countries
affected. These ideas are expected to lead the way at the European Union High Level Conference on Ebola on March 3rd, 2015.

Meanwhile, Medical News Today recently learned about a study where after analyzing landscape
features of precise geo-locations of Ebola spillover from animal reservoirs
into humans, researchers concluded human population density and vegetation cover may be important
factors.

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